False Dichotomies

1. What does Obama think about what’s happened? An interesting piece in Slate suggests one of the reasons for leaking candidates’ names before finalising them is to gauge opinion on the prospective appointment. The Freeman appointment got a lot further down the road than a leak, of course, but the principle still applies. Could Obama have been using the National Intelligence Council position as a barometer to test how the interested parties would react? Or is that granting him too much foresight? Certainly, he’s already got into trouble in making appointments, partly because of a lack of foresight and partly because of the difficulties in having to make so many new appointments (one of the strange quirks of the American system). In any case, I’m not sure it means much vis-a-vis policy, given that the role of the NIC director – properly understood –  is to dispassionately deliver intelligence assessments and then let the policy-makers do their stuff. Read more